OPEN

I saw this last week on the brilliant journalism.co.uk and just haven’t got round to blogging about it yet: The Daily Telegraph has very kindly shared its in-house style guide for blogging with which it has armed its fourteen current bloggers.

For instance, it gives some advice on using links in copy:

Try to avoid writing things like "you can read the full report here", with ‘here’ being the link. A construction such as "the charity released a report, which said" is much better.

I must say, I think I use links the good and the bad way, by the Telegraph’s measure. I suppose the latter is more elegant.

Given the paucity of posting on my own blog in the past week or so, I also read the section on "stock posts" to resort to when you’re stuck for inspiration or time (the latter has very much been an issue for me recently) with interest. They recommend four strategies: the "holding post" (adding to a previous post and explaining what you’re up to), the "backgrounder" (summing up a wider issue with flurry of useful links), "answering back" (responding to some interesting comments made on previous posts), "I saw this and thought of you" (a quick point to an interesting article or post elsewhere) and most encouragingly "experiments" (just try posting something in a new way to see if it works).

I prefer those approaches to the "links for today" approach, which I don’t think would add much to my blog.

Anyway, the Telegraph’s blog style guide is a must-read for bloggers, journos and PRs – it’s a great little insight into experiences of a few professional journalists.

Tags: dailytelegraph, newspaper, journalism, blogging

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